Flash Fiction

| March 6, 2012 - 3:28pm

The Star welcomes submissions for its fiction or memoir, and nonfiction “Guestwords,” columns. They can be sent by e-mail to submissions@ehstar. com.
Writers are encouraged to provide pieces that comply with length restrictions: 700 to 1,200 words for “Guestwords,” and 1,500 to 2,000 words for fiction or memoir submissions.
However, for our fiction slot, we’d love to see examples of flash fiction or micro-fiction, a short-short story genre that has gained growing attention, including through a number of publications.
Some examples can be found at these Web sites: flashfictiononline.com, flashfiction.in, among numerous others.
We do not expect writers to take the genre to its ultimate form — a story in only six words, such as the one reportedly written by Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
But we’d love to publish a collection of examples of flash fiction — stories of fewer than 1,000 words — and sometimes less than half that length.
The genre is defined in a 1998 article by Camille Renshaw, “The Essentials of Micro-Fiction,” as “tight, provocative fiction,” in which writers take an idea and distill it into a microcosm of its original self, and through which readers “discover something brief and intimate in a very short space.”
Flash fiction contains the classic elements of story — a protagonist, conflict, complications, and resolution — but, because of the limited length, some of those elements remain unwritten, and only hinted at or implied.
We look forward to seeing your work!